Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [75]
Every evening the primatologists would return to the field station sweaty and aching, mostly without having seen a chimpanzee. As I sat by the washbasin, I reflected that with ants, discoveries don’t necessitate an arduous trek. Plop down anywhere, and wonders show up before your eyes. One good friend, Stefan Cover, found a new ant species floating, half drowned, in a swimming pool in Arizona. Bill Brown, a maverick of ant research, was renowned for collecting dozens of kinds of ants from a single rotten log.
When I was about to leave Gashaka for good, I poured some honey bait among the subs in the basin as a gesture of farewell. The cook, wearing a long, bright-colored shirt locally known as a buba, watched me from a shady corner of his kitchen hut. He looked relieved that I, who had sat in the heat-addling sun for days staring at offal, would be out of his way. As I departed, glancing over my shoulder at the station, I saw him dash out of the hut, get down on one knee, and stare into the basin before scratching his head and returning to the shade.
Weaver ant workers in peninsular Malaysia pulling together the foliage that will form their nest.
9 canopy empires
Cross River National Park, with its rich yield of driver ants, was the highlight of my visit to Nigeria with Caspar Schöning. But the highlight of that highlight was a dramatic Mission: Impossible–style assault I saw occur between driver ants and weaver ants.
It was our only night inside the park. Caspar and I had pitched our tents at the edge of the rainforest, near the guard post. All was silent. I awoke early, my back aching from the hard ground, and got up to find a line of bright orange weaver ants hanging by their long legs from nearby tree foliage. Marching swiftly below them was a column of the darkly pigmented driver ant Dorylus sjöstedti, returning from a night of raiding.
Lowering herself carefully, suspended by her hind legs, one of the weaver ant workers reached into the mass of driver ants and, without drawing the attention of the other ants in the surging column, grabbed a worker by the waist. Then, with the assistance of other weaver ants on the same leaf, she lifted the driver ant from the column and pulled it into the tree, where the group tore it to pieces. A minute later another weaver ant did the same thing.
I called out to Caspar and reached for my camera: this was a moment worth recording. Oecophylla longinoda weaver ants dominate Africa’s treetops, creating territorial empires sharply different from the army ant’s roving bands on the ground. (The weavers have an equally rapacious cousin in tropical Asia, Oecophylla smaragdina, a species that tends toward green in the easternmost extreme of its range in Australia and the Solomons.)1 Their initiative in executing driver ants is well documented.2 The move I saw seemed a kind of Russian roulette, though: surely the heavily carapaced driver ants would demolish the slim weaver ants the instant they noticed their depredations.
A weaver ant nest of bound leaves at Ta Prohm temple, Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, where the ants are a local delicacy.
I saw a way to test this. Up in the tree above the driver ant column was a leafy sphere held together with white silk: a weaver ant nest. I clipped off the lightweight bundle and dropped it onto the driver ant column, expecting to see a full-bore retaliation resulting in the death of all the weaver ants. Instead, the normally unflappable Dorylus driver ants withdrew entirely, with every one of the workers doing an abrupt about-face.
So many tens of thousands were in retreat that the traffic artery swelled to the width of my clasped hands; it then grew arms as ancillary columns shot